Review

Reviewed Work(s): Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet by Roberta Reeder

Review by: Sonia I. Ketchian
Source: Harvard Review, No. 9 (Fall, 1995), pp. 191-192
Published by: Harvard Review
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27560567
Accessed: 16-01-2020 02:07 UTC

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within patterns, mirrorings, and self-referential loops. By having parts reflecting the
whole, his work, along with that of Borges and Douglas Hofstadter (G?del, Escher,
Bach) is the closest that modern literature has come to fractal creations. The five
cherished (and somewhat incompatible) qualities have colored the two genres very
differently. Calvino's essays follow classicist tradition?humane, erudite, humorous;
his stories, in their convoluted settings and detached treatment of characters, come
across as hothouse flowers or sophisticated exercises: beautiful but brittle, admirable
yet arid.
The Road to San Giovanni is a collection of ?ve vignettes reflecting in various
ways some of Calvino's central literary attributes. The first four are obviously
autobiographical and correspond to the Hindu life stages of child ("The Road to San
Giovanni"), youth ("A Cinema-Goer's Autobiography"), warrior ("Memories of a
Battle"), family head ("La Poubelle Agr??e"). The last essay, "From the Opaque," a
collection of musings that obliquely yet cumulatively convey Calvino's world view
and hence his writing credo, corresponds to the life stage of pilgrim or sage.
The stories were written between 1962 and 1977, when the world was a
gentler, slower place, at least for the middle class, which was not yet battling for
dwindling resources and leisure time. At times, even when he considers himself
enlightened, Calvino sounds patronizing?not unlike many authors who abhorred
injustice and inequality on principle yet resented underlings who challenged them.
In both content and style the vignettes differ from other Calvino works,
verging on the lyrical without ever letting go of their intellectual tone. The accuracy
and spareness of the descriptions in the first three stories, like descriptions in a ballad,
engage our emotions. These first three pieces vividly evoke place and time: the Italian
countryside before World War II; the old-style Hollywood films as gates to an unreal,
unattainable world; a melee between partisans and fascists.
In other ways the stories are faithful to Calvino's usual style. The calm,
unhurried delivery, the long convoluted sentences come as an interesting change to
those accustomed to the staccato grunts of contemporary music and video. In the first
three vignettes a part stands for the whole. The walk to and from a country estate
denotes an entire childhood; the furtive visits to the local cinema represent the
growing up of a child set apart because of his active inner world; the inconclusive,
inglorious melee between partisans and fascists evokes the eternal dichotomy be
tween the theoretical glory and the real fatigue and brutality of battle. In the fourth
piece, Calvino the essayist derives large meanings from the simple task of emptying
the family trash barrel. The collection is engaging for its style, rhythmically translated
by Tim Parks, and (intermittently) for its content. Yet only the last piece transcends
the mundane. The first four vignettes are minor works. "From the Opaque," however,
an essay designed like the decorated Mobius strips seen in Eschefs art, is an articulate
and moving declaration of a writer's passion for his craft.
- Athena Andreadis

Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet by Roberta Reeder. St. Martin's Press,
1994. $35.00 ISBN 0312112416.
The Golden Age of Russian poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, which was ushered in by Russia's greatest poet Pushkin and his contempo
raries and prepared the ground for the great realistic Russian novels, was matched
early in the twentieth century by the Silver Age's explosion of Russian literature and
culture. Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) entered this competitive arena and gained
fame with her lyrics Evening (1912), followed by Rosary (1914). Initial acclaim changed
to censure and persecution of her and her family by the Soviet regime. But she

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withstood, first in relative silence, then, about 1940, with some of the century's most
outstanding verse.
Reeder follows Akhmatova's eventful life, works, and times using the poet's
memoirs and those of others, scholarly studies (augmented by the plethora of
materials published for her centennial), and oral communication with Akhmatova's
friends. The attractive book reads easily thanks to its fascinating topic and wealth of
journalistic information: indeed, the writers Blok, Pasternak, Brodsky, Khlebnikov,
Maiakovsky, the artists, the background details on Bloody Sunday, World War One,
and the Revolution all too often push Akhmatova off center stage. A stark contrast to
Akhmatova's brief and concise poetry and prose, this voluminous compilation of
material in straightforward English with generous annotations is valuable for the
general reader. The reader learns much about Akhmatova and her writings, her
contemporaries, and the cultural scene. Particularly helpful is the overall view of
Evening, the descriptive presentation based on scholarly exegeses of Akhmatova's
dense masterwork Poem without a Hero, her Northern Elegies, and the later works.
Reeder concentrates on people she has met who knew Akhmatova and relies
heavily on their versions of the story. This can lead to distortions or omissions of
which readers should be aware. Akhmatova's family, for instance, seems to play a
relatively small part in this work. Though the book (like many films) devotes much
attention to Akhmatova's funeral and the mourners, her son Lev is almost invisible.
It was he, after all, who had accepted his mother's instructions to give Akhmatova's
sealed archive to the Pushinsky Dom, a decision confirmed by the courts that was
abruptly put aside in favor of Irina Punina (the daughter of Akhmatova's common
law husband Nikolai Punin); this episode, like much of Lev's own sufferings, is
passed over in silence. Equally shadowy are portraits of Akhmatova's other rela
tives?her brother Victor, who died in New York, and Victor's first wife Hanna
Gorenko, who cared for Akhmatova at her country cabin during the poet's periods of
"exile" from Leningrad by Irina. Indeed, the true role of Irina Punina?her conflicts
with Akhmatova?is never made quite clear; Hanna Gorenko's largely unpublished
memoirs could have set the record straight. Omitted too are some of the private details
of Akhmatova's life; her hearing loss, poignantly evoked recently by Clarence Brown,
and her phobias (crossing the street) documented by Lidiia Chukovskaia.
Errors mar the book. Some are carried over from the Hemschemeyer edition,
others involve Reeder's translations, or the page numbers cited in the footnotes.
Quotations are often only paraphrases, or they condense several pages into one block
quotation. Not all the explanations are convincing. Nonetheless, this chatty, highly
readable book, which offers both background information and pictures (including
two by Modigliani, known but not previously published in iconography), fulfills a
commendable purpose by making Akhmatova and her world available to a general
English-speaking audience.
-Sonia I. Ketchian

Duras: A Biography by Alan Vircondelet. Translated by Thomas Buckley.

Dalkey Archive Press, 1994. $24.95 ISBN 1564780651.
Those who have read the novels of Marguerite Duras are acquainted with
her unforgettable voice?sonorous yet perfunctory, limpid yet obscure, repudiating
all norms of character, story, time, and place. Duras paints a world at once constricting
and limitless, obsessively retracing themes of longing exile, isolation, and despair. In
his new biography, Duras, Alan Vircondelet pays what appears to be the ultimate
tribute to his subject's incantatory vision by narrating her life in a typically Durasian
manner. Composed entirely in the present tense, the biography is an example of

Harvard Review 192

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